Ritual Roadways and Places of Power in the Chaco World (ca. AD 850-1150)
Abstract
This paper considers the topic of sacred spaces in North America through the vantage offered by Chacoan roads, monumental avenues constructed by Ancestral Four Corners people of the US Southwest from ca. AD 850-1150. I begin with a critique of the concept of the “sacred” as applied to the Chacoan past, suggesting instead that the Indigenous North American concept of power (in the sense of potent, generative force infused throughout the environment) offers a more culturally relevant framing. Next, I present three examples of locations along Chacoan roads that I argue were recognized as places of power due to the inherent landscape affordances of these locales. I close by briefly describing some of the practices carried out along Chacoan roads and drawing a connection between the understanding of “sacredness” evidenced through the archaeology of Chacoan roads and contemporary Native American activist efforts to protect landscapes of great power and meaning.
Keywords
Chaco Canyon; Chacoan roads; archaeology of religion; Southwestern archaeology
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University of Colorado Boulder United States
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5197-804X
Robert S. Weiner is the 2022-2023 Paloheimo Fellow at the School for Advanced Research and a PhD Candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on Chaco Canyon, with emphasis on monumental roads, religion and ritual, gambling, and Diné (Navajo) oral traditions. More broadly, he is interested in the history and materiality of religion, cognition, monumentality, and comparative approaches in archaeology. Weiner has published a dozen peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and he has won grants from the National Science Foundation and American Philosophical Society among other funders.
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